"Mji wake ni mzuri."
Translation:His town is nice.
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no. the "wa-" in "wake" in this case comes from the singular prefix "m-" in the M/MI non class (from "mji"), not the plural "wa-" prefix of the M/WA noun class.
the "-ke" is the singular part of "wake" showing that it belongs to one entity "him."
- his town = mji wake
- their town = mji wao
- my town = mji wangu
- our town = mji wetu
1088
I tried "village" instead of "town" and was marked incorrect. I feel like town and village are synonyms, but not so in Swahili?
as i understand it mji is just town. But i know it's never totally clear when a population is a large town vs a small city so i have heard people use the word mji to talk about what would likely be considered a city.. there's some gray area. In the states we almost never call anything a "village." Even when only a couple thousand people live somewhere, it's a town...
1088
It has to do with the noun classes. "Mzuri" is indeed used for people since they are in the first and second class (m/wa) and nouns in that class use the m- prefix for adjectives, but the m- prefix is also used with third class nouns (the singular part of the m/mi pair). A "nice town" would be "mji mzuri" (third class) and "nice towns" would translate as "miji mizuri" (fourth class).